For a supposedly educated Jew, I'm actually pretty week on my own culture. Schama's magisterial history cultural history is triumph of ordinary Jews across the millennia. He begins, not with the Torah or the Patriarchs, but with the Egyptian town of Elephantine, a frontier garrison with a thriving Jewish community, their lives recorded in garrulous Hebrew potsherds and a semi-heretical temple.

Then it's off through the Iron Age, the Second Temple, Herod, and so on. This was a period of exile, of return under Cyrus the Great, and of Jewish kingdoms playing a key role in the fraught politics of the Alexandrian successor states.

Jewish history isn't quite a dirge, but there are many mournful points, most involving the other monotheistic religions of Christianity and Islam. Jews were cast as god-killers from the origin story of Christianity, with the key anti-Semitic mythos promulgated by 4th centruy archbishop John Chrysostom, who declared Judaism anathema in an effort to bulwark up the shakily Christian Eastern Roman empire. While relationships with Muslim communities were generally better, Jews were still forbidden from bearing arms and forced to pay a humiliating head tax.

This is a long book, hard for me to sum up, but to essay an attempt, Schama has a talent for showing the diversity and continuity of Jewish life across time, and how it has thrived in harsh terrain.